Grumpy Old Sod Dot Com - an internet voice for the exasperated. Sick of the nanny state? Pissed off with politicians? Annoyed by newspapers? Irate with the internet? Tell us about it!

Send us an email
Go back
11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
Captain Grumpy's bedtime reading. You can buy them too, if you think you're grumpy enough!
More Grumpy Old Sods on the net

 

 
Older stuff
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Wonderful what you can demonstrate with a few statistics, and how many people are eager to be fooled by them, isn't it?
 
The smoking ban has been declared a success. Health chiefs say that in its first full year in England, over a thousand lives were saved. That's pretty clever of them, considering that there has never been anywhere in the world a properly authenticated case of someone dying from passive smoking – the whole thing is based on a vague “well, breathing other people's smoke, it has to be bad for you doesn't it?” kind of basis. There is only one proper scientific way to test the hypothesis: that's to have one test group of people who don't smoke, and don't hang about in public places where others are smoking; and one control group who do smoke and do go into public places where others are smoking. Then you see how many of each group die.
 
Trouble is, how do you find public places where others are smoking? You can't – it's banned. So let's just fall back on good old “it's obvious”.
 
Or perhaps they're suggesting that it's the smokers themselves who aren't dying in such numbers? In that case, it's a bit early to be drawing conclusions, isn't it? Some people have to stop smoking in the pub and a year later 1,000 of them haven't died – what kind of scientific reasoning is that? All kinds of things have happened in the last year apart from the smoking ban – David Beckham isn't playing for England, there's been a massive recession, we now no longer have a Labour government, BP have spilled a load of oil into the Gulf of Mexico; why not claim that the drop in the death rate is down to one of those?
 
Still, so cock-a-hoop are the left-wing knowalls who think they have the right to dictate to the rest of us how we should live our lives, that already they're wondering how next the law of the land could be used to force us to behave in the way they think we ought. There was a discussion about this on Radio 4 the other day. Some thoughtless tosser said that he would like parliament to pass legislation that would make it illegal for anyone to smoke in the presence of anyone younger than themselves (which discriminates against old blokes like the GOS). And that being the first in any group to light up would also call down the full weight of the law.
 
We have an alternative solution, tosser. We think it should be made illegal for you to open your fat mouth in the presence of anyone older than you. Or younger. Or the same age.
 
Then there was the lady from Brake. Have you noticed how there's ALWAYs a lady from Brake? And have you noticed what short-sighted, irrelevant bollocks they talk? This one wanted a blanket 20mph speed limit in all built up areas. She said it would save the lives of children, the elderly and cyclists (er ... why would we want to save the lives of cyclists, exactly?).
 
Perhaps she's right, and a few children's lives might be spared. But we'd like to suggest a few alternative strategies that would work far better ...
 
• Let's make it a criminal offence, punishable by a £1,000 fine or six months in prison, to let your child out of the house. That really WOULD save some kids' lives, and if it saves just one child's life, isn't it worth it?
 
• Let's ban cycling. Then all these poor cyclists who are being mown down indiscriminately by us vicious hoodlum motorists would have the full protection of the law. They'd also have the protection of the four walls of their houses because of course if they can't cycle they just wouldn't ever leave home, as they have no lives at all. It would be a bit of a sacrifice for them, but if it saves just one cyclist's life ....
 
• Alternatively, if we lack the political will to do the sensible thing and ban cyclists, let's make cyclists subject to the law in the same way motorists are. When a motorist drives down the street and comes to a parked car by the kerb, he has to check his mirror, signal that he's going to pull out, pause if the way is not clear, and then go past the parked vehicle and back onto his own side of the road. Cyclists, however, think they own a strip of road about 3 feet wide, and that they can do what they like in this strip without reference to other road users. Unfortunately, the strip swings out to pass any parked cars, so cyclists don't have to look behind them or signal their intentions – they just pull blithely out. But it's OK – if they pull out in front of a car and get knocked off, it's the car driver's fault.
 
• Let's have a law banning the wearing of black. Whether you're on the road, on the pavement, walking in the country, swimming in the sea, whatever you're doing, you want to be seen. So, no black clothes, OK? There'll have to be some exemptions, of course; Roman Catholic priests, nuns, funeral directors, SAS men, Muslim women and others whose livelihoods depend on being inconspicuous, but it should put a stop to Ozzy Osbourne's career as a fashion icon and lifestyle guru.
 
• Come to think of it, why (that's “why oh why oh why” if you're a Daily Mail reader) do we still allow people to swim in the sea? Or even go near it? Everyone knows it's dangerous. Ban it. The sea's for fishes. And crude oil.
 
• And sailing. And climbing. And paragliding. And motorsport. And football. And rugby, especially rugby. Remember, it's all for your own good, and it reduces the chances of you drowning or falling or crashing or breaking your neck or inconveniencing the emergency services in any way, or having any fun at all. Knitting's out, too – those needles could do a lot of damage in the wrong hands. In fact, we can't think why the police aren't arresting little old ladies on buses for carrying offensive weapons.
 
And why stop there? People are just blithely crossing the road on the way to the bookies', so let's ban bookies. People trip up on uneven or icy paving stones and have to go to casualty and cost the NHS a lot of money, so let's rip up all the paving stones, or simply impose a nationwide curfew every time the temperature drops below two degrees. We could have police marksmen or local authority rodent control operatives patrolling the streets, shooting anyone they find out of doors, like they do if you leave your dustbin lid open.
 
People choke on peanuts; why not ban peanuts? Almost every foodstuff known to man is bad for us; why not pass a law compelling every supermarket to sell nothing but lettuce? Obesity outlawed at a stroke: that has to be a good thing, doesn't it? If it saves the life of one lard-arse ...
 
But let's just go back to the poor motorist for a moment. Have you noticed how the “road safety professionals” (that's anyone who has a nice cushy job with a public service pension, either with the local council or the local speed camera partnership) always refer to speeding drivers as “idiots”? In fact, many members of the general public - especially cyclists and Daily Mail readers – habitually refer to motorists in these terms. “Don't these idiots realise they're at the controls of a lethal weapon?” and blah blah blah ...
 
We'd just like to draw the attention of anyone who has ever been tempted to speak of motorists in this way to consider the following fact. Roughly 3,000 people are killed on British roads every year. Actually it's a little less than that, and falling.
 
Wow, I hear you say, that's dreadful! Let's execute anyone who drives a car faster than 20mph! Let's imprison everyone who has an accident! Let's hunt down and exterminate all white van drivers, and eat their children! These are 3,000 innocent people who leave behind grieving mothers, wives and children. They cost the NHS squillions of pounds. It costs over £1million to clear up after every fatal accident. We must work to reduce this terrible figure. Even if we only save the life of one child ....
 
Firstly, I'd like to know who this one child is that keeps getting its life saved. It's either enormously lucky, or a stupid little toe-rag. Probably the latter – it does keep getting into these scrapes that it has to be rescued from. If someone can let me know the little bastard's name and address, I'll undertake to go round and put it permanently out of our misery.
 
And secondly, that figure of 3,000 deaths isn't dreadful at all.
 
It's bloody marvellous!
 
Think about it. How many million car journeys do we make each day? There are 33 million cars on Britain's roads. Say each of us drives our car once a day, five days a week; it's probably more, but how would we know? That's eight thousand, five hundred and eighty thousand million car journeys each year. Which means that one person is killed for every two million, eight hundred and sixty thousand car journeys.
 
Just think what that says for the skill, restraint and self-discipline of those 33 million drivers, that they can deftly weave their way round our overcrowded road system, keeping their temper, maintaining their vigilance, avoiding cyclists and children, more-or-less obeying even the daftest speed limits, concentrating on the road ahead, anticipating problems, and generally staying so safe that we have this almost unbelievably low death rate on our roads.
 
These people aren't idiots, they're bloody saints.
 
Oh, by the way, Mrs.Brake, if you could let me have your address, I'd like to come round and tattoo “arsehole” on your bottom. Because you're an idiot. Yes, I know we've never met and I have no way of knowing how intelligent you are, but ... well, you disagree with me, so you MUST be an idiot. Stands to reason. That's science, that is.
 

 
Grumpy Old Sod.com - homepage
 

 
Use this Yahoo Search box to find more grumpy places,
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Copyright © 2010 The GOS
 
Grumpy Old Sod.com - homepage

 

Captain Grumpy's
Favourites
- some older posts

 
Campaign
 
Proposal
 
Burglars
 
Defence
 
ID cards
 
Old folk
 
Hairy man
 
Democracy
 
Mud
 
The NHS
 
Violence
 
Effluent
 
Respect
 
Litter
 
Weapons
 
The church
 
Blame
 
Parenting
 
Paedophiles
 
The Pope
 
Punishing
 
Racism
 
Scientists
 
Smoking
 
Stupidity
 
Swimming
 
Envirocrap
 
Spying